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News & Blog

Our expert faculty are frequent contributors to consumer-based media as well as to more scholarly academic publications. Keep current with recent developments in the retirement income planning field and check out the latest articles from the thought leaders who are part of the The American College New York Life Center for Retirement Income.

The part of the Labor Department's fiduciary rule that has heartened supporters and caused heartburn for opponents, the best-interest contract, could become a casualty of the ongoing reassessment of the rule.

The Labor Department is seeking to delay the compliance deadline of the fiduciary rule by 18 months as it seeks to rework the Obama-era mandate. That would push the effective date for the rule to July 1, 2019.

Professor Jamie Hopkins, Retirement Income Program co-director at the American College, said “The proposed delay was entirely expected. The delay is really more about giving the DOL time to rework the rule rather than companies really needing more time to prepare.”

Indexed and variable annuities are the biggest winners of the Department of Labor's recently telegraphed fiduciary rule delay. Sales of the products, especially indexed annuities, would arguably have been the most adversely impacted under the original timetable, which had the full regulation going into effect on Jan. 1, 2018.

The rule’s reach could be reduced significantly if the DOL expands exemptions, although the rule itself probably isn’t going away, Jamie Hopkins, a professor at the American College of Financial Services, tells the paper. The DOL didn’t immediately make a comment to the Journal.

About three in four (74%) Americans failed a 38-question retirement literacy quiz published as part of the survey by the American College of Financial Services New York Life Center for Retirement Income. In fact, respondents to the survey answered on average slightly less than half the questions correctly.

The Department of Labor issued a notice of administrative action in one of the pending industry lawsuits against the Obama-era fiduciary rule: an extension of the transition period and delay of the applicability date until July 1, 2019 for three main exemptions to the rule.

The Labor Department is proposing to delay the fiduciary rule’s compliance deadline by 18 months, a move that experts say suggests the retirement-savings rule will emerge from a re-evaluation with significant revisions.

Women are not necessarily well-prepared to manage the money coming towards them in the future. Only 18% of retirement-age women passed a financial literacy quiz on making a nest egg last through retirement, compared with twice as many men who passed.

Retirement-age women score poorly when it comes to financial literacy, according to MarketWatch. Just 18% of this cohort passed a quiz from the American College of Financial Services on making a nest egg last through retirement.